Wedding Photographer Yorkshire Dales — Wharfedale, Swaledale, Malham Cove and the Limestone Fells
The Yorkshire Dales National Park is England’s most scenically distinctive upland landscape — a 2,179-square-kilometre national park of Carboniferous limestone plateau, the Pennine fells’ heathered moorland and eleven major dales carved by glacial and meltwater action, whose combination of the Great Scar limestone’s white pavement erratic blocks, the Pennine’s dark gritstone summits and the valley floors’ meadow wildflowers creates a portrait landscape of quite singular geological character. For Yorkshire Dales wedding photography, the limestone landscape’s specific portrait vocabulary — Malham Cove’s 80-metre curved limestone amphitheatre, Gordale Scar’s overhanging tufa gorge, Aysgarth Falls’ triple limestone staircase waterfall and the dry-stone wall’s grey geometric patterns above the Dale’s meadow floors — provides portrait environments of English limestone upland of extraordinary character.
Malham Cove, Gordale Scar and the Limestone Pavement
Malham Cove — the 80-metre curved limestone amphitheatre east of Malham village, formed by the Craven Fault’s movement and the glacial meltwater overfall that originally plunged from the cove’s lip (now dry) to the valley below — provides one of England’s most dramatic natural landscape portrait settings: the curved cliff’s white limestone face, the clints and grykes of the limestone pavement above the cove’s rim and the valley floor’s pasture below create portrait compositions of geological drama available in the Dales’ most celebrated visitor destination. Gordale Scar — the overhanging tufa gorge carved into the limestone pavements above Gordale Beck between massive overhanging walls of tufa-coated rock — provides a second gorge portrait setting of distinctly darker and more dramatic character than Malham’s open cliff.
Wharfedale, Swaledale and the Dales Meadow Landscapes
Wharfedale — the Wharfe’s limestone valley from the Strid’s churning gorge at Bolton Abbey north to Buckden’s dale head, with Bolton Priory’s Augustinian ruins above the Wharfe’s stepping-stones and the Strid Wood’s ancient oak woodland SSSI — provides the Dales’ most accessible and most varied valley portrait landscape: the priory ruins, the stepping stones and the Strid gorge within a single valley walk. Swaledale’s barn-and-wall landscape — the upper Swale’s pattern of 400-year-old stone field barns and grey limestone walls dividing the meadow floor into the Dales’ most photographically celebrated patchwork landscape — provides a portrait setting of English upland pastoral of quite specific character. The Aysgarth Falls’ triple limestone staircase waterfall in Wensleydale provides a waterfall portrait destination.